“You make relationships. One at a time. With the same painstaking attention to craft that you knew as a maker.”

“A leader’s real ‘authority’ is a power you voluntarily give him,” David Foster Wallace wrote in what remains the wisest meditation on leadership I’ve ever encountered, “and you grant him this authority not with resentment or resignation but happily.” But for many people in creative fields — artists, designers, filmmakers, writers — “leadership” remains an alienating notion that belongs in the business world or, worse, politics. And yet in an age of increasing creative collaboration and a world where any creative person putting a piece of herself out there is a “marketer,” whether willingly or not, the question of how a creative person can also be a great leader without sacrificing her art is an increasingly urgent one. The delicate marriage of these two domains of mastery, often falsely framed as contradictory, is what design sage John Maeda explores in an interview found in Make Your Mark: The Creative’s Guide to Building a Business with Impact (public library) — the most recent installment in the series of entrepreneurship and self-enhancement field guides by 99Ueditor-in-chief Jocelyn Glei, which previously explored how to hone your creative routine and how to make your own luck.

Maeda — who headed research at the MIT Media Lab for thirteen years, spent the following six as president of the Rhode Island School of Design, and is one of the kindest, most thoughtful, and most generous human beings I know — considers the often uncomfortable shift from maker to leader that paralyzes many creative people:When you make things with your hands, you force something into being. You sand it, you cut it, you fold it… You do everything to build it from end to end. Whereas leading requires a lot of talking, a lot of communicating — not using your hands. And when you’re a creative who makes things, you immediately build a distinction between the talkers and the makers. And makers tend to look down on talkers. And leaders are talkers. You don’t trust them, but now you’re one of them. [laughs] At first you think you can’t make anything with your hands anymore. But you can. You make relationships. One at a time. With the same painstaking attention to craft that you knew as a maker.This notion that human relationships are an act of creativity and craftsmanship, a supreme art, is something Van Gogh captured a century and a half earlier, and yet it remains a counterintuitive idea in a culture that continues to subscribe to the lone genius myth, in art and in business, despite towering counterevidence and beautifully argued cases against it. Maeda speaks to this dangerous fallacy:As a leader, you are alone — and accountable for the needs of the whole. The whole is the product. And you’re making it. You own it. And you succeed and fail by it… True creative leaders recognize that they live and die by their team.Essentially, Maeda exposes the vital but overlooked parallels between making great artifacts and making great movements or communities — both are acts of creativity and require great craftsmanship. The difference, he points out, is in the delay of the payoff from the fruits of the creator’s labor:The timeline is longer. A lot longer. You don’t get the immediate gratification that you might as a designer when the timelines are shorter. But artists are used to delayed gratification… and manage ambiguity better than anyone else.Maeda is the author of Redesigning Leadership, in which he explores the many dimensions of the subject in greater depth and detail.Complement Make Your Mark — which includes wisdom on entrepreneurship and the creative life from Seth Godin, Tim O’Reilly, Scott Belsky, and more — with the firsttwo installments in the series, then revisit Lisa Congdon’s field guide to the psychology and practicalities of becoming a successful artist and Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull on the key to creative leadership.